Plaisted Writes Again - A blog of political and cultural commentary and observation of national/local issues and events.

Monday, November 05, 2012

Fox "News" and The Big Lie of Benghazi

Ever since the day he was elected in 2008, the Republicans and their various pliant, script-reading sycophants in the right-wing media have promoted an unprecedented stream of falsehoods and phony premises to try to prevent the reelection Barack Obama that, it appears, might occur on Tuesday.

For four years, they have set up straw men, lied, smeared, belittled, dehumanized and delegitimized the president -- or at least tried to. Although they managed to chip away slightly at Obama's well-earned stature and accomplishments in the face of the Historic Mess Junior Bush irresponsibly left for him to clean up, the frustrated Grand Boobahs of the Right will find themselves in the same place they did in 1996 after trying to pull the same shit on Bill Clinton -- on the outside, looking in to a White House controlled by Democrats for another four years, who will protect the country from their Evil Designs by fighting against their agenda and for their own every step of the way.

The Republicans have an increasingly sophisticated method to get even their most putrid, offensive anti-Obama messages into the mainstream of political discourse while maintaining what they think is a plausible deniability. For instance, no self-respecting member of the GOP establishment would get within 100 yards of a drooling birther ranting in the public square or Fox News about Obama's birth certificate. And yet, you can bet the Dark Hand of Karl Rove or some other oily operative could be found, if only someone would look, slipping 10s and 20s into the dirty mitts of Orly Taitz to fund her demonstrably frivolous lawsuits. Mitt Romney doesn't have to skip around the country calling President Obama a European socialist -- he's got hoards of talk radio stooges who do it for him every day.

And Mitt Romney doesn't have to spend any time trying to make the tragedy in Benghazi on 9/11/12 into some kind of political liability for the president. He's got a fake news network that is more than willing to do it for him, 24 hours a day, for two months.

In the third debate, Romeny took the advice of his advisers to, well, not debate. He rolled over and agreed with the president on numerous foreign policy issues, from Iraq to Afghanistan. Moderator Bob Schieffer set it up the Benghazi "issue" on a tee for him the first question of the debate -- and Romney passed, ignoring the question and rambling about "rejecting this kind of extremism" and other such blather. Jaws dropped across the country as the astro-turfers in the tea party did spit takes in disgust because the guy they reluctantly hired to finish off Obama refused to take the bait.

But Romney knew what he was doing. He didn't "go after" the president on Benghazi not for the right reason -- because there was nothing to "go after" him about -- but for the wrong reason: because he knew his surrogates on Fox News, talk radio and the other well-paid right-wing mouthpieces were going to do his dirty work for him. He didn't say anything because he didn't have to.

And Fox News did not disappoint. It's one thing for the Fox "opinion" show hosts like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity to dutifully read their Rovian talking points like the obedient servants they are. But, last I heard Fox was insistent that its "news" shows -- hosted by fake "journalists" like Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and the like -- are to be taken seriously as "fair and balanced" news. Serious viewers laughed that one off years ago (Kelly, who I watch at noon almost every day, leads every show with "new questions" that have arisen about some Obama action or other, real and imagined). "Fox" is to "News" as "military" is to "music". One has nothing to do with the other.

But the entire network -- especially the fake news shows -- have gone way beyond what they have done in the past to support the Republican cause. Literally every show on the network has led with some kind of feigned "outrage" about the Benghazi tragedy every day for the past two months, throwing out code words like "cover-up" and "Watergate" like they were candy from a Mardi Gras float. It has not been a running news story; it has been a campaign, uninterrupted even for Hurricane Sandy. When Fox talking heads were not breathlessly bleating Benghazi hysteria, they were bloviating about how the mainstream media was not following their lead, thereby engaging in an enormous pro-Obama cover-up of their own. The network's fake news programs have promoted phony memes in the past, but, in terms of feigned passion and commitment to the "story" over all platforms, this is a new level of alternate-fact-universe creation, even for Fox.

This is especially the case since there is no there there. In recent days, real news reports have emerged, describing in detail the events of the Benghazi tragedy, including timelines provided by the military, the CIA and the White House. None of it leads any credence and in fact puts the lie to the various fictitious versions of the events developed by Fox and its always-undisclosed "sources". Saddest of all was the exploitation of (and by) the father of one of the murdered CIA agents, Tyrone Woods, who pitifully did the talk-radio/Fox News circuit in the past weeks, complaining about insincere and limp-handshake condolences offered by Obama and Secretary of State Clinton at a private meeting (nobody who knows Obama or Clinton would believe such a farcical version of their ability to express sympathy) and asking for "answers" about what happened to his son. When the Fox host would helpfully offer him a chance to take a direct hit at the president, Charlie Woods said, oh no no no, he didn't want to politicize his grief. Yet, that was just what he was doing.

And Fox News hasn't stopped. Yesterday on his Sunday show, Chris Wallace -- about as close as Fox News gets to a real journalist, which means "not close" -- started with interview with Obama campaign chief David Axelrod by grilling him on Benghazi for five minutes. It continues today -- whenever the idiots on Fox and Friends took a break from their phony Romney optimism, they would lurch into some kind of Benghazi rant or other.

The naked politicization of national tragedy has been the GOP's stock-in-trade since before 9/11/01, which Junior Bush and Cheney used to drive the Stupid War in Iraq, the Patriot Act, and all manner of insane power-grabbing by that despicable regime. The same people are driving this last desperate attempt by the Romney campaign to turn around their doomed prospects. It's way past time to resign these bastards to the dustbin of history where they belong.